New York Times review finds Trump's public language more vulgar and less coherent than a decade ago

The Times collected thousands of Trump's speeches, interviews, social media posts and schedules from Roll Call's Factba.se, covering 2015 to late October, and used the AI model Claude Opus 5.5 to score more than 6,500 passages of his speeches for rambling and confusion. It found the shift less notable since a similar review in 2024.

Among its findings: Trump uses 19 per cent more all-or-nothing words such as "always", "never" and "totally" at rallies than he did a decade ago, and 5 per cent more than in 2024, a sign of black-and-white thinking, which experts say often accompanies advancing age or cognitive decline. He uses nearly 15 swear words per 10,000 words, against 14 two years ago and six a decade ago. The review counted rambling or confusing digressions 2½ times as often in his second term as in the 2016 campaign, although roughly the same as in 2024. Rallies now average 85 minutes, twice the 42 minutes of a decade ago, while his public schedule has thinned to 1.3 events per weekday from 2.1 in his first term. He posts online an average of 21 times a day, up from 13 a day in 2016 but down from 34 two years ago.

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle hailed the president's "sharpness, unmatched energy, relentless work ethic and historic accessibility" and dismissed concerns about his provocative comments. "The president doesn't care about being politically correct; he cares about making America great again," Ingle said. "The American people love how authentic, transparent and effective the president is." Trump's physician, Sean Barbabella, wrote in a three-page summary released in May that the president had scored 30 out of 30 on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment and that his "Cognitive and physical performance are excellent".

Former Republican congressman Francis Rooney told the Times: "He's saying so many stupid things, even for him, so many outrageous and aggressive things. This aggressive kind of attack language, that's something I've never heard from a president."

Trump defends his stream-of-consciousness style as a "brilliant" approach he calls "the weave". At a rally in Clarksville, Tennessee, he marvelled at his reception: "I could say the stupidest things and you'd clap. 'Oh, I love you so'." He added: "But we don't say the stupidest things. We say things of common sense." In Chillicothe, Ohio, on Wednesday he called himself "a very high-IQ person" and said of cognitive tests: "I'm the only president that agreed to take them. And they're hard, you know? Obama couldn't have passed it. Biden we don't even talk about." He has raised the tests unprompted at about half a dozen recent rallies.

The review cites a string of recent remarks. At a rally in Greenville, North Carolina, he told the story of the Willie Horton case that helped sink Michael Dukakis's 1988 presidential campaign, then told it again 30 minutes later, using some of the same language and getting the facts wrong both times. He has told supporters to "cheat like hell" in this week's elections, said military leakers "should be shot", said he wants to ban immigrants from Norway "because I didn't get the Nobel Prize", and mispronounced the Strait of Hormuz as the "Hormone Strait". His allies say too much is made of comments that are really just jokes.